How do stories convince us? Notes towards a rhetoric of narrative.(Essays)(Essay)

 
I tell you he got more arguments out of stories than he did out of law 
books, and the queer part was you couldn't answer 'em--they just made 
you see it and you couldn't get around it. I'm a Democrat, but I'll be 
blamed if I didn't have to vote for Mr. Lincoln as President, couldn't 
help it, and it was all on account of that snake story of his on 
illuminatin' the taking of slaves into Nebraska and Kansas. Remember it? 
(Tarbell 1907, 9) 

I

How do stories convince? How do stories and "law books" appeal differently? How do narratives argue?

This essay addresses these questions. They are important questions, not just for the literary scholar but also for every person. For the "story of our lives" is a central part of our self-talk and of the conversations about us. We live our lives as stories--or as "narratives," as the literary scholars prefer to say. Whatever the term, the fact is that a deeper understanding of the subtle dynamics of storytelling and "narratology" can shed valuable light both on literature and on our lives.

The fictional stories that become part of our cultural fabric and social mythology both reflect and shape our lives: the plots of novels and the "storied lives" of fictional characters influence our lives (and resemble them too). We have much to learn from closer study of literary narratives. Art not only "entertains," as Horace observes in The Art of Poetry, it also "edifies." My reflections here aim to illuminate how stories edify us, whereby I also explore the implications of their instruction (or "persuasion").

The three questions in my opening paragraph serve as a broad framework for our inquiry, which I explore from the perspective of rhetorical studies, a field generally devoted to matters of persuasion and argumentation. I advance a conceptual outline for what might be termed "a rhetoric of narrative," i.e., if we consider rhetoric in the classical tradition as "argumentative speech." For these are rhetorical questions--not in that they do not solicit answers, but in that they demand rhetorical approaches toward answers. Among my concerns will be to distinguish narratio from narrative theory, persuasion from conviction, and narration's epistemic function from its ontological status.

In attempting to construct a rhetoric of narrative, we must take up not only the what of narrative but also the how. We must venture beyond the grammatical to the other two arts of the medieval trivium: logic and rhetoric.